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Fall ‘Trouble Begins’ lectures explore Twain’s life and work

Staff report
Published 6:57 p.m. ET Sept. 26, 2017

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Samuel Clemens - pen name Mark Twain - spent many summers at Quarry Farm in Elmira writing novels. After receiving the property, Elmira College turned the house into a retreat center for Mark Twain scholars.

First event set for Oct. 4 in Cowles Hall at Elmira College

Various aspects of Mark Twain’s life and work will be explored during Elmira College’s The Trouble Begins Lecture Series.(Photo: AP)

The fall portion of the 2017-18 The Trouble Begins Lecture Series presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies will feature four lectures, with the first event set for Wednesday, Oct. 4, in Cowles Hall at Elmira College. The four free lectures begin at 7 p.m.

The first lecture, “Aileen Mavourneen & the Transatlantic Anti-Vivisection Movement,” will be presented by Emily E. VanDette, associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Fredonia. This lecture will discuss Twain’s 1903 anti-vivisection novella “A Dog’s Tale,” putting his stance in the context of the vivisection controversy. It will connect Twain’s prescient portrayal of animal voice and identity to modern-day animal rights activism and post-humanist philosophy.

On Wednesday, Oct. 11, at Quarry Farm will be “Mark Twain and the Inventor Fiction Boom: Technology Meets American Conceit, 1876-1910” presented by Nathaniel Williams, lecturer at the University of California, Davis. In “Tom Sawyer Abroad” (1894), Twain sends his most famous characters — Tom, Huck and Jim — on an airship voyage across the Atlantic into Africa. By the time Twain wrote that novel, nearly 100 similar stories about young Americans in imaginary aircraft and other vehicles had appeared in magazines and serials. This presentation covers some of those works along with Twain’s unique contributions to the dime-novelist genre.

The series continues at Quarry Farm on Wednesday, Oct. 18, with “Mark Twain and the Narrative Magic of Medieval Literary Spunk-Water Stumps” presented by Liam Purdon, professor of English at Doane University. While Twain uses of Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur” as inspiration for “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” lesser studied is his use of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” for “The Prince and the Pauper” and “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.”

On Wednesday, Nov. 1, in Cowles Hall at Elmira College will be a lecture and book signing by Hal K. Bush, author of “The Hemingway Files.” Bush, a professor of English at St. Louis University, explores “Collecting Mark Twain: Obsessions over the Great Authors and ‘The Hemingway Files.’” Obsession is frequently an overlooked focus of major literary works, but in novels like “Moby-Dick,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Possession,” “The Aspern Papers” and “The Great Gatsby,” characters are often driven to extremes by their obsessions over various objects or concerns.

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s 1866 lecture in San Francisco. By invitation, Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus.